Trying to recover from its debacle in last year’s Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress is all set to reach to its grassroots workers in the State to formulate future strategy and prepare a revival plan, particularly keeping in mind the Assembly polls in 2017.
In probably a first-of-its-kind experiment, a questionnaire containing around two-dozen queries has been prepared that will seek opinion of workers on issues related to ideology, organisational structure, future strategy and media planning.
The entire exercise is part of the party chief Sonia Gandhi’s directives to all State unit heads asking them to present a detailed report by February end, taking feedback from ground-level workers, particularly reaching out to village and block-levels committees. All State units will have to go through thousands of such questionnaires within a month before preparing their State-specific reports containing agenda for revival of party’s fortunes in those States, Congress sources said.
With Uttar Pradesh being the biggest State with maximum number of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats, the State unit will begin the month-long exercise from Monday.
The party's State in-charge Madhusudan Mistry and State party president Nirmal Khatri will meet the newly-formed State executive and will be followed by district presidents and block-level committees reaching out to workers in their areas getting feedback on the questionnaire, they added.
State Congress chief Nirmal Khatri told The Hindu that the questionnaire would be a comprehensive set of questions that would try and find out what major changes were required in terms of party’s ideology, its organisational structure, its future strategy to strengthen organisation and deal with changing face of electoral politics, and also media planning.
“The entire exercise is aimed at reaching out to every worker discussing threadbare all shortcomings that need to be addressed on priority basis,” he added.
Mr. Khatri further said a detailed report compiling these questionnaires would be presented to the party president by February 20 by when other States would also have done so. “All these reports will then be tabled before the Congress Working Committee that would help in preparing a blueprint for revival of the Congress nationwide...With Uttar Pradesh being the biggest State, our responsibility is the maximum,” he noted.
Terming the entire exercise as a step towards party's preparations for the Assembly polls in 2017, Mr. Khatri said the Congress would bounce back in the State.
“We are targeting the next Assembly polls. We will soon start our State-wide membership drive, while meetings and demonstrations would also be held across the State to protest against the misrule of the Samajwadi Party. We will also expose how the BJP after coming to power in the Centre has forgotten all its promises and was now befooling people,” he added.
